I often carry on about my computer getting dragged into black holes but this time it really did. Apart from trees falling down on phone lines and stuff… long story but the short of it is that I now have a new phone line and a new computer too. Not sure if I’m glad because I must admit that not having a computer or a phone line did free me up for other pursuits, like painting with real paint; reading real books; writing with real pens etc - not that I pursued any of them besides the reading but I did have good intentions. Anyhow, alas/alack, now I’m binary bound and shackled once more.
This laptop takes a little getting used to. It doesn’t have the patina that my old monster had. Doesn’t make the same comfortably familiar Cranking Victorian Machinery noises, like an old and rusty (but faithful) robot-dog called up out of its basket for a spot of reluctant cat-chasing. But it’s okay. It will do.
I was amazed to find that famous people have been leaving entertaining comments on this blog in my absence – ok, one semi-famous person anyhow. See “Poet as Hired Gun”. I had thought that this blog was fairly innocuous and a bit boring, with at most about five occasional readers, but it just goes to show. This month it was Mandy De Waal, she-poet who runs with wild horses (?) in the Magaliesberg, and still manages to hold up a well paid day-job too. Mandy doesn’t do garrets, and is ‘empowering’ other ‘poets’ to follow suit. There is a lot of Added Value in it.
Here is a comment posted by Gwen Watkins to Mandy’s original article about poetry and business, which can be found at http://www.biz-community.com/Article.aspx?c=18&l=196&ai=9575
“The concept of using poets to pursue a political agenda is hardly new, nor the idea of persuading workers that "imaginative" ideas will in any way set them free.
Many poets were used by the state or tacitly wrote to please. For as many freedom poets as you can find, I can find those that glorified the state. Even Shakespeare was not above twisting the truth so as not to annoy Queen Elizabeth I – the play Richard III is not in the least accurate but the truth did not set you free in those ‘enlightened’ times – it put you in the Tower of London.
Poetry is about the flight of imagination – it springs from deep and true emotions. It’s something I have done for forty years but never on command. Shaped poetry to achieve an end is no longer poetry and as for praise singing – its very name tells you exactly what its purpose is – propaganda set to rhythm.”
Which was very well said, I thought.
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Saturday, April 01, 2006
PAX
I've decided to put all my grudges aside and be more mature. So, forthwith, I will no longer be mean to Marketing People. I won't make sarcastic blog entries about Marketing People. I won't post any more irritating comments to Bizcommunity. I will live in peace, and let Marketing People live in peace too.
This I swear, so help me gods.
This I swear, so help me gods.
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Just Brand Me
A triptych:
1
Kieron Dwyer is in big trouble. He subverted Starbucks. After he’s been sued to smithereens, no doubt he’s going straight to hell. Not many can parody a mindset so eloquently, and this thing is a work of art, so damn and sue me - I’m posting it. (For the full story go to http://www.cbldf.org/pr/001130-starbucks.shtml)
2
The people in charge of protecting the interests of the brand integrity of the film Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes™ sent Neil a letter threatening to sue if he does not remove a link to AOTKT’s official website. Not that Neil did ever actually link to that, um, illustrious entity in the first place. Initially, he was amused, thinking it might be some kind of prank by Dadaist Lawyers, but was disappointed to find that it was not. Anyhow, if you have nothing better to do (e.g., if you like watching lawyers make asses of themselves on behalf of people who think too much of themselves; and especially if you hate vegetables), you might want to scuttle off to these urls and be mildly entertained:
http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2006/03/mystery-dada-tomato-threats.html
http://www.tomatoesareevil.com/ (links page, although the Link That Caused All The Trouble doesn’t exist. Anymore.)
3
Authors and other artists often use cultural markers to help describe the particular ‘flavour’ of a scene. Some brands get so interwoven with a culture that they become like unto salt for the table. But a couple of the big guys are unhappy about the use of their marks in fiction; worried that overexposure will result in “trademark dilution”. If they get their way, you won’t be able to say the word “Harley” in a story about a biker anymore. And don’t use Nike’s name in vain ok? Or Else. No more free advertising, guys. If you want to advertise McDonalds in your story you’ll have to pay them for the honour.
So instead of writing something like, “In a fit of depressed defiance she ate an entire box of Quality Street,” you’ll have to write, “…she ate an entire box of those assorted toffees and chocolates in various brightly coloured foil and cellophane wrappers; you know - the kind often given by pupils to teachers at the end of a school year.”
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Poet as Hired Gun
“Poets will no longer live outside the fringes of business, but will become increasingly commonplace within the heart of the corporation as cultural decoders, praise singers, mediators between management and labour and as a facilitator for forging a new paradigm for leadership.” - Mandy de Waal
She says this with a straight face. She believes it too, deliriously caught up as she is in the evangelism of Marketing. Mandy has in her trinity: the market as father, brand management as son and ‘poetry’ as holy ghost. One gets the feeling that her holy ghost is her wild card - ‘Poetry’ is just so hot right now.
Thankfully, we can trust genuine poets to evade this new career that Mandy is so excitedly marking out for them, because one of poetry’s many functions is to expose precisely the kind of speech she sells for what it has always been – rhetorical verbiage. Spin and praise-singing by their nature can never claim the edge of poetry’s diamond blade. No deal, Mandy. Whatever you put out in the name of Marketing Almighty won’t really be poetry, and those who devise it won’t be real poets. Deep down, you know this, Mandy.
(Besides, what corporation in its right mind would invite poverty and chaos by admitting a poet to the inner sanctum? And in any case, the vital elixir of attic dust wouldn’t settle well in gleaming boardrooms. You’d have allergic reactions all over the place)
She says this with a straight face. She believes it too, deliriously caught up as she is in the evangelism of Marketing. Mandy has in her trinity: the market as father, brand management as son and ‘poetry’ as holy ghost. One gets the feeling that her holy ghost is her wild card - ‘Poetry’ is just so hot right now.
Thankfully, we can trust genuine poets to evade this new career that Mandy is so excitedly marking out for them, because one of poetry’s many functions is to expose precisely the kind of speech she sells for what it has always been – rhetorical verbiage. Spin and praise-singing by their nature can never claim the edge of poetry’s diamond blade. No deal, Mandy. Whatever you put out in the name of Marketing Almighty won’t really be poetry, and those who devise it won’t be real poets. Deep down, you know this, Mandy.
(Besides, what corporation in its right mind would invite poverty and chaos by admitting a poet to the inner sanctum? And in any case, the vital elixir of attic dust wouldn’t settle well in gleaming boardrooms. You’d have allergic reactions all over the place)
Sunday, March 26, 2006
I agree with the Eskom Man
As everyone living and travelling in SA knows, we are having some trouble with our power supply. We’ve grown so fast that the grid cannot cope, no-one seems to have predicted it, and then there’s the trouble with that bolt (?) at Koeberg. We are helpless as babies, of course, plugged into and completely dependent on the matrix, and people sit around gnashing teeth and rending garments waiting for the power to come back on. The boss of Eskom got really upset in a boardroom recently, where there were wraparound windows with all the crisp Cape Town daylight anybody could possibly need for a meeting pouring in, and where every electric light in the room blazed nonetheless. “Turn them OFF!” he raged. He mentioned that we’re greedy and excessive and we’re part of the problem, and I completely agreed with him. Many didn’t, including David Bullard, who went on to pen a sarcastic and indignant paragraph berating the man for urging us all to be less wasteful. The gist of his angst is that THEY (meaning whoever is in charge of anything at any given time. My kids say that Chuck Norris is THEY) are incompetent gits and THEY’RE making excuses and THEY have a duty and THEY’RE failing us.
But I still agree with the Eskom Man. We DO have to learn how to use less. If only we had a global Mao-type entity to initiate a re-education programme of some sort to this effect, with really steep penalties like execution or something for failure to comply. We won’t do it ourselves, by choice, so someone’s going to have to dictate it.
I got Tagged. Huh? I’m usually about three light years behind any given current development but it made me feel kind of important, in a sad little way. Tagged? By Toutatis, What does this mean?!? It must be a Marketing Ploy! But no, it’s one of those circulatory pass it on things. This one doesn’t seem to come with dire warnings about what will happen to you if you don’t pass it on, so there isn’t any fun in not-passing-it-along-on-purpose-just-to-see-if-the-terrible-things-happen. May as well pass it on then… Thank you, David.
Four jobs I've had:
Window Dresser
Waitress
Illustrator
Starship Navigator (at school they called it “tends to daydream”)
Four movies I can watch over and over:
Pi
Life Aquatic
Finding Nemo
Galaxy Quest
Four places I've lived:
Blantyre, Malawi
Chirimba, Malawi
Johannesburg, S.A.
Cape Town, S.A.
Four TV shows I love:
Star Trek
Voorblad
Going Nowhere Slowly
Fawlty Towers
Four highly regarded and recommended TV shows I haven't seen:
Highly regarded and recommended by the general TV-addicted public? I don’t even want to know.
Four of my favourite dishes:
Noodle soup
Toast with peanut butter
Macaroni cheese
Bread & butter pudding
Four sites I visit daily:
- not online daily, but most frequently I visit:
neilgaiman.com
hereinmyhead.com
a couple of blogs: do they count as sites?
bizcommunity.com (out of a sado-masochistic compulsion to observe Marketing People in their natural habitat, and also to amuse myself by irritating them as much as possible with pernickety comments. They are very easily irritated and sometimes I have nothing better to do when my brain gets empty. Which is sad, sad, sad I know but we all have our vices)
Four places I've been on holiday:
Zimbabwe
Mozambique
Botswana
England
Four albums I can't live without:
Tori Amos, Scarlett’s Walk
Loreena McKennit, The Mask and Mirror
Zakir Hussain, Making Music
Eva Cassidy, Live at Blues Alley
Four places I'd rather be right now:
Navigating a Starship
Sitting on the shady bench overlooking Diana’s Eco Shrine in Hogsback
Reading a book on the stoep of one of the beachfront cottages in Keurboomstrand
Having an ice-cold whatever’s-going at midday in the dark, cool Waenhuis in Nieu Bethesda after walking the dust roads on a particularly dry, hot and windy day.
Four other people I’m tagging:
Dio
Owen
Neil :-)
Desmond Tutu
Friday, March 17, 2006
Emission Control, We Have a Problem
This is a Very Long lecture-thingy, anyone who doesn’t like it can go and google “britney and kevin” or something.
A good while ago I asked, what is Carbon Trading? After a month of looking at it from as many angles as I could, I really wish I’d never asked, because it turns out that Carbon Trading is like piling all the deck chairs onto the up end of a sinking ship and sipping cocktails while pretending it’s not sinking. It is a great delusion, and probably the most ambitious business scam in history.
It works like this:
We on planet earth have something called the greenhouse effect, a natural heating system that is necessary for life on earth as we know it, but which in excess is harmful to life as we know it. Certain human activities have pushed the limits in this regard, by releasing far larger amounts of the relevant gases than would naturally have been released. This isn’t a good idea right now – as yet, we have nowhere else to live. A bunch of countries got together in the early nineties to see what could be done to mitigate snowballing of the greenhouse effect. Some stuff was decided. All participating countries had legally binding Reduced Emissions Targets to meet. The targets were inadequate, but it was a start.
Also, a plan was devised which, among other things, allows CO2 and other greenhouse gases to be traded. The idea was that the more you intended to emit, the more expensive it would be for you, in theory penalising the worst offenders where it hurts them most – in the pocket. (In practise, of course, the more the big money spends itself the bigger it gets)
Very simplistically: say you normally use 150 emission units, that is; you emit x amount of greenhouse gas. It’s been decided that this is too much and you are given an amount of 100 units that you may not exceed. Your neighbour is in credit, though: he uses only 50 units because he has far less industry than you do, but is also allowed to use 100. You yourself can’t actually get by with only 100 and still live the way you’re used to living, but if you want to you can buy 50 of your neighbour’s unused units (with money or trees or good deeds, it’s quite flexible) and use them for him on your own behalf. He’s happy, you’re happy, everyone’s saving the world and making money into the bargain. What is being traded here is, literally, hot air: and look - you are still making exactly the same amount of emissions as you were before. So is your neighbour. And mostly, the Kyoto Protocol becomes a farce.
Carbon Trading, AKA the Emissions Market, is a forked-tongue arrangement for ‘offsetting’ greenhouse gas emissions. It will allow poor and underdeveloped nations to remain poor and underdeveloped while under licence to rich overdeveloped nations who will continue as before, in real terms not reducing emissions at all, just spreading them around a bit.
Carbon Trading has many rabbits in its hat, but has trees as its star crowd-pleaser. The theory goes like this: trees remove CO2 (one of the greenhouse gases) from the atmosphere, and store the carbon molecules. Therefore, if we plant new forests* in poverty stricken countries, they will function as global CO2-sponges and carbon-containment-fields (officially known as carbon sinks). The development of genetically modified super-trees is also proposed, which may soak up even more CO2 and store even more carbon. An amazing offshoot of this is that the poor get to benefit from it, through infrastructure investment and through the trees themselves, which can eventually be harvested and used in wondrous ways.
It sounds okay if you’re too busy with the daily grind of life to be paying proper attention, which is mostly the case. A closer look suggests that this kind of mopping up and storing is temporary. The theory is, at best, wishful thinking and at worst, outright deception.
The loco logic of Emissions Markets (google it – the money-numbers are staggeringly huge) says that it’s okay - we can keep releasing carbon that took millions of years to lock down in fossil deposits, if we just plant trees which will mop it all back up again. Instantly. Well it’s not that simple. The way they put it, we’ll have a planet full of people thinking that Carbon is the devil and only trees can save us, halleluiah. Carbon and Carbon Dioxide are not the same thing. Carbon itself isn’t a “greenhouse gas”. Carbon’s not the problem – it’s the conversion of it into extra CO2 by releasing too much of it into the air that’s the problem. Fossil deposits like oil, coal, peat and chalk are the most efficient carbon sinks of all - they can store carbon for eons while trees cannot. Stripping fossil deposits and replacing them with trees is like smashing a ruby and replacing it with a red glass bead – only much, much worse.
The Carbon Trade marketing pitch uses the sentiments of reasonably educated people to dishonestly plug for the “welfare” of the less fortunate. “It will help all the poor people so much,” the schpiel goes. “It’s win-win! We will plant trees that the poor will benefit from and the poor in turn will benefit the whole earth by allowing us to do so! Why, you too can offset your own greenhouse footprint, Joe Public - just plant a tree for every X amount of air-miles that you do. We have seen the light, and it’s trees.”
Get totally serious about spending serious money on searching for alternative, clean, sane, renewable energy? Stop over-consuming insane, dirty energy in the meantime? By the Gods, why bother? Let the leftover mutants huddled around the North Pole as the century ends worry about that stuff. Let them trade bread if they want to. If they can find any. OK let them trade nuts and berries then. If they can find any. For now we’ll just trade carbon credits because it’s so lucrative. Live in the moment. No worries, eh?
Genuine ethics would probably not smile upon carbon trading with its potential for abuse and corruption, and its ability to deflect attention and money away from a committed search for alternative energy sources. (It’s not just energy either – we do so many things in excess that are harmful, for example, we mine peat on a large scale so that we can use it as a medium to grow table-mushrooms in. We want millions of mushrooms on our plate right through the year and so this is how we do it)
The Emperor always needs a new suit and the tailors will always have a job. And, since the world-pool of generally acceptable things is increasing exponentially (in the interests of runaway-train-freedom-of-speech and freedom-of-whatever-whenever, all that), we might soon get some new Reality TV: once a week, all the little kids who tug at mummy’s skirt and say “But the Emperor has no clothes on!” will be lined up against the wall and shot. Pour encourager les autres, as Lynne Truss would say.
Maybe the planet has a plan of its own and maybe we’re part of it. Maybe it consciously wants us to keep turning up the heat and become extinct so that it can have a new era, experiment with some novel and interesting life forms. The runaway greenhouse effect is not necessarily bad for the actual planet (which seems to relish changing its look and feel from time to time); it’s only bad for humans and quite a few other species. But I believe** that the Earth itself will survive us. As important and powerful as we think we are, I don’t think we actually have the ability to vapourise the planet, even if we childishly nuked it one day just to see what would happen.
* Not actually forests. More accurately, they plan large scale monoculture tree plantations. There are big differences, for example: An established forest has a generational spread of young, mature, old and dying plants, as well as a variety of species both fauna and flora. All the species support different cycles within the whole while interacting, the system is robust because natural disease etc has less chance of bringing down the entire system when there’s a variety of species with different immune responses. Detritus is quickly broken down by myriad organisms and becomes compacted as humus on the forest floor – sealing it layer by layer and, if undisturbed, trapping carbon molecules in the medium to long term. A natural mature forest is one of nature’s own carbon sinks… etc… etc. Whereas a plantation consists of a single species and generation, vulnerable to various scourges, humus is not effectively formed, carbon molecules only trapped in actual trees for as long as they stand – short term… etc…etc.
**Belief: You can only believe something you do not know to be true. Whatever cannot be verified or proven in the present must simply be believed, or not believed. You don’t have to believe in tax, for instance, because it exists and can be proven. But you have to believe in fairies, god, human kindness, etc because no proof exists.
Some believe in Virgin Birth, even against proven biological facts to do with humans and their ridiculous inability to wind-pollinate. But then, we know very little verifiable stuff about Angels at this point. Perhaps in the future it might be proved that they can in fact do it without doing it, and sceptics will have to apologise. Maybe cloning is not so much a new technology as a forgotten art, and back in 0000 they were using it all the time. Could artificial insemination qualify as immaculate conception? In the hands of the right Marketing People, yes absolutely.
Belief is a wonderful tool. You can believe, or not believe, in absolutely anything you want to. There are no limits and no boundaries with belief. It’s very much like Marketing, actually.
A good while ago I asked, what is Carbon Trading? After a month of looking at it from as many angles as I could, I really wish I’d never asked, because it turns out that Carbon Trading is like piling all the deck chairs onto the up end of a sinking ship and sipping cocktails while pretending it’s not sinking. It is a great delusion, and probably the most ambitious business scam in history.
It works like this:
We on planet earth have something called the greenhouse effect, a natural heating system that is necessary for life on earth as we know it, but which in excess is harmful to life as we know it. Certain human activities have pushed the limits in this regard, by releasing far larger amounts of the relevant gases than would naturally have been released. This isn’t a good idea right now – as yet, we have nowhere else to live. A bunch of countries got together in the early nineties to see what could be done to mitigate snowballing of the greenhouse effect. Some stuff was decided. All participating countries had legally binding Reduced Emissions Targets to meet. The targets were inadequate, but it was a start.
Also, a plan was devised which, among other things, allows CO2 and other greenhouse gases to be traded. The idea was that the more you intended to emit, the more expensive it would be for you, in theory penalising the worst offenders where it hurts them most – in the pocket. (In practise, of course, the more the big money spends itself the bigger it gets)
Very simplistically: say you normally use 150 emission units, that is; you emit x amount of greenhouse gas. It’s been decided that this is too much and you are given an amount of 100 units that you may not exceed. Your neighbour is in credit, though: he uses only 50 units because he has far less industry than you do, but is also allowed to use 100. You yourself can’t actually get by with only 100 and still live the way you’re used to living, but if you want to you can buy 50 of your neighbour’s unused units (with money or trees or good deeds, it’s quite flexible) and use them for him on your own behalf. He’s happy, you’re happy, everyone’s saving the world and making money into the bargain. What is being traded here is, literally, hot air: and look - you are still making exactly the same amount of emissions as you were before. So is your neighbour. And mostly, the Kyoto Protocol becomes a farce.
Carbon Trading, AKA the Emissions Market, is a forked-tongue arrangement for ‘offsetting’ greenhouse gas emissions. It will allow poor and underdeveloped nations to remain poor and underdeveloped while under licence to rich overdeveloped nations who will continue as before, in real terms not reducing emissions at all, just spreading them around a bit.
Carbon Trading has many rabbits in its hat, but has trees as its star crowd-pleaser. The theory goes like this: trees remove CO2 (one of the greenhouse gases) from the atmosphere, and store the carbon molecules. Therefore, if we plant new forests* in poverty stricken countries, they will function as global CO2-sponges and carbon-containment-fields (officially known as carbon sinks). The development of genetically modified super-trees is also proposed, which may soak up even more CO2 and store even more carbon. An amazing offshoot of this is that the poor get to benefit from it, through infrastructure investment and through the trees themselves, which can eventually be harvested and used in wondrous ways.
It sounds okay if you’re too busy with the daily grind of life to be paying proper attention, which is mostly the case. A closer look suggests that this kind of mopping up and storing is temporary. The theory is, at best, wishful thinking and at worst, outright deception.
The loco logic of Emissions Markets (google it – the money-numbers are staggeringly huge) says that it’s okay - we can keep releasing carbon that took millions of years to lock down in fossil deposits, if we just plant trees which will mop it all back up again. Instantly. Well it’s not that simple. The way they put it, we’ll have a planet full of people thinking that Carbon is the devil and only trees can save us, halleluiah. Carbon and Carbon Dioxide are not the same thing. Carbon itself isn’t a “greenhouse gas”. Carbon’s not the problem – it’s the conversion of it into extra CO2 by releasing too much of it into the air that’s the problem. Fossil deposits like oil, coal, peat and chalk are the most efficient carbon sinks of all - they can store carbon for eons while trees cannot. Stripping fossil deposits and replacing them with trees is like smashing a ruby and replacing it with a red glass bead – only much, much worse.
The Carbon Trade marketing pitch uses the sentiments of reasonably educated people to dishonestly plug for the “welfare” of the less fortunate. “It will help all the poor people so much,” the schpiel goes. “It’s win-win! We will plant trees that the poor will benefit from and the poor in turn will benefit the whole earth by allowing us to do so! Why, you too can offset your own greenhouse footprint, Joe Public - just plant a tree for every X amount of air-miles that you do. We have seen the light, and it’s trees.”
Get totally serious about spending serious money on searching for alternative, clean, sane, renewable energy? Stop over-consuming insane, dirty energy in the meantime? By the Gods, why bother? Let the leftover mutants huddled around the North Pole as the century ends worry about that stuff. Let them trade bread if they want to. If they can find any. OK let them trade nuts and berries then. If they can find any. For now we’ll just trade carbon credits because it’s so lucrative. Live in the moment. No worries, eh?
Genuine ethics would probably not smile upon carbon trading with its potential for abuse and corruption, and its ability to deflect attention and money away from a committed search for alternative energy sources. (It’s not just energy either – we do so many things in excess that are harmful, for example, we mine peat on a large scale so that we can use it as a medium to grow table-mushrooms in. We want millions of mushrooms on our plate right through the year and so this is how we do it)
The Emperor always needs a new suit and the tailors will always have a job. And, since the world-pool of generally acceptable things is increasing exponentially (in the interests of runaway-train-freedom-of-speech and freedom-of-whatever-whenever, all that), we might soon get some new Reality TV: once a week, all the little kids who tug at mummy’s skirt and say “But the Emperor has no clothes on!” will be lined up against the wall and shot. Pour encourager les autres, as Lynne Truss would say.
Maybe the planet has a plan of its own and maybe we’re part of it. Maybe it consciously wants us to keep turning up the heat and become extinct so that it can have a new era, experiment with some novel and interesting life forms. The runaway greenhouse effect is not necessarily bad for the actual planet (which seems to relish changing its look and feel from time to time); it’s only bad for humans and quite a few other species. But I believe** that the Earth itself will survive us. As important and powerful as we think we are, I don’t think we actually have the ability to vapourise the planet, even if we childishly nuked it one day just to see what would happen.
* Not actually forests. More accurately, they plan large scale monoculture tree plantations. There are big differences, for example: An established forest has a generational spread of young, mature, old and dying plants, as well as a variety of species both fauna and flora. All the species support different cycles within the whole while interacting, the system is robust because natural disease etc has less chance of bringing down the entire system when there’s a variety of species with different immune responses. Detritus is quickly broken down by myriad organisms and becomes compacted as humus on the forest floor – sealing it layer by layer and, if undisturbed, trapping carbon molecules in the medium to long term. A natural mature forest is one of nature’s own carbon sinks… etc… etc. Whereas a plantation consists of a single species and generation, vulnerable to various scourges, humus is not effectively formed, carbon molecules only trapped in actual trees for as long as they stand – short term… etc…etc.
**Belief: You can only believe something you do not know to be true. Whatever cannot be verified or proven in the present must simply be believed, or not believed. You don’t have to believe in tax, for instance, because it exists and can be proven. But you have to believe in fairies, god, human kindness, etc because no proof exists.
Some believe in Virgin Birth, even against proven biological facts to do with humans and their ridiculous inability to wind-pollinate. But then, we know very little verifiable stuff about Angels at this point. Perhaps in the future it might be proved that they can in fact do it without doing it, and sceptics will have to apologise. Maybe cloning is not so much a new technology as a forgotten art, and back in 0000 they were using it all the time. Could artificial insemination qualify as immaculate conception? In the hands of the right Marketing People, yes absolutely.
Belief is a wonderful tool. You can believe, or not believe, in absolutely anything you want to. There are no limits and no boundaries with belief. It’s very much like Marketing, actually.
Friday, February 17, 2006
RSS Awards
Welcome to the first monthly Really Stupid Song Awards.
Runner-up: Shakira. She sings, “Lucky that my breasts are small and humble so you don’t confuse them with the mountains.” This song narrowly missed the top spot because something might have gotten lost in the translation, as so often happens. The song was probably even stupider in Spanish, but this is an English award.
And the winner is: Barbra Streisand and Barry Gibb for Stranger in a Strange Land, the ultimate soundtrack to a delusion. Barbra sings, “I write a letter every single day to a stranger in a strange land far away.” Barry sings, “Da-dada-da dadada-da-dada”… They’re so… happy! Starry-voiced and wrapped in warm, fudgy vanilla emotion. Little flocks of bluebirds dart through the song, you can see the rainbows stretched across sparkling waterfalls. A pink butterfly flutters coyly on each phrase. Lambs and lions lie down in dewy pastures, and in the hazy distance you can see a little nuclear family skipping along, waving goodbye to “somebody’s son” who’s going off to fight “somebody else’s war” with a flask of hot chocolate tucked into his rucksack.
Congrats Barbra and Barry! You win a fools-gold-plated copy of Springbok Hits Country Style (the one with Barbara’s Daughter and Snakes Crawl at Night, around summer ’81 – “I am Barbara’s daughter, I am Barbara’s child”; “Oh the snakes crawl at night, that’s what they sa-ay, when the sun goes down, then the snakes do pla-ay”), and a big box of Quality Street.
Nominations for next month’s award can be posted to Comments. To qualify, songs must have actual lyrics, but needn’t be current hits.
Monday, February 13, 2006
Being James
Stephen King tells a marvellous story about James Joyce:
“According to the story, a friend came to visit him one day and found the great man sprawled across his writing desk in a posture of utter despair.
‘James, what’s wrong?’ the friend asked. ‘Is it the work?’
Joyce indicated assent without even raising his head to look at the friend. Of course it was the work; isn’t it always?
‘How many words did you get today?’ the friend pursued.
Joyce, still in despair, still sprawled face down on his desk, said, ‘Seven.’
‘Seven? But James, that’s good, at least for you!’
‘Yes,’ Joyce said, finally looking up. ‘I suppose it is… but I don’t know what order they go in.’”
- From “On Writing” by SK
“According to the story, a friend came to visit him one day and found the great man sprawled across his writing desk in a posture of utter despair.
‘James, what’s wrong?’ the friend asked. ‘Is it the work?’
Joyce indicated assent without even raising his head to look at the friend. Of course it was the work; isn’t it always?
‘How many words did you get today?’ the friend pursued.
Joyce, still in despair, still sprawled face down on his desk, said, ‘Seven.’
‘Seven? But James, that’s good, at least for you!’
‘Yes,’ Joyce said, finally looking up. ‘I suppose it is… but I don’t know what order they go in.’”
- From “On Writing” by SK
Friday, February 10, 2006
Yuri’s Night
Yuri’s Night
Whose night???? Yuri’s. I just learned that April the 12th is the anniversary of Mankind’s first ever space-flight, by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in 1961, and also the launch of the first space shuttle exactly 20 years later. Many, many people will be throwing wild parties on Yuri’s Night, the kinds of parties where toasts are made to The Final Frontier… parties where people have Sudoku-type tournaments and where if you don’t wear spectacles you’ll feel a bit out. THAT kind of party. The coolest kind by far. Ok so I’m no good at Sudoku but SOMEONE has to make the sandwiches and pour the drinks, don’t they? To infinity and beyond!
I have nothing at all to say about the cartoon blasphemy brouhaha. But I do have a sort of parable:
In Terry Pratchett’s alternate universe there is a collective of omnipotent being-things called the Auditors. They hate life, because it’s messy. They can’t interfere with it, though, because that’s against the fundamental unwritten Rules. They would cancel life in an instant if it weren’t for those rules. What they can do, is play little tricks on it.
Thus: “The ascent of mankind must have been a boon to [the Auditors]. At last there was a species which could be persuaded to shoot itself in the foot.”
(From Thief of Time by TP)
That’s all.
Whose night???? Yuri’s. I just learned that April the 12th is the anniversary of Mankind’s first ever space-flight, by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in 1961, and also the launch of the first space shuttle exactly 20 years later. Many, many people will be throwing wild parties on Yuri’s Night, the kinds of parties where toasts are made to The Final Frontier… parties where people have Sudoku-type tournaments and where if you don’t wear spectacles you’ll feel a bit out. THAT kind of party. The coolest kind by far. Ok so I’m no good at Sudoku but SOMEONE has to make the sandwiches and pour the drinks, don’t they? To infinity and beyond!
I have nothing at all to say about the cartoon blasphemy brouhaha. But I do have a sort of parable:
In Terry Pratchett’s alternate universe there is a collective of omnipotent being-things called the Auditors. They hate life, because it’s messy. They can’t interfere with it, though, because that’s against the fundamental unwritten Rules. They would cancel life in an instant if it weren’t for those rules. What they can do, is play little tricks on it.
Thus: “The ascent of mankind must have been a boon to [the Auditors]. At last there was a species which could be persuaded to shoot itself in the foot.”
(From Thief of Time by TP)
That’s all.
Thursday, February 09, 2006
Save Our SALT
I have to post this long lecture-thing here. Have to, because I haven’t heard anything more about this issue lately and I fear somebody may be Sweeping It Under The Carpet. Maybe not enough people know about it, and so it’s probably my duty to post it up. Even if only 2 more people in the world hear about it. If Phil Plait gets to hear about it, then I’ll count him as a hundred people because he’s the only real Astronomer I know (and I don’t even know him and he doesn’t know me either), and maybe he can talk to Other Astronomers and maybe they can, I don’t know, do a petition or something. Something. Anything.
Sutherland, Karoo, South Africa. Desolate, and in the middle of nowhere, but famous in certain circles, because of SALT. The Southern African Large Telescope was built in Sutherland for specific reasons: no light pollution, minimal radio pollution. Crisp, clean air and all the stars you could ever hope to see in a southern night sky. It has a very important job, and it should be one of our most treasured possessions, but most (80%?) South Africans don’t even know it exists and if they did, they wouldn’t care much, or realise how important it is. (“Oh, look, it’s a telescope, that’s nice. Where’s the mall?”)
So “they” are now looking to do a golf course development in Sutherland. The reasons for "them" actually even thinking about wanting to do this in the first place are unfathomable to me... someone must have been pissed or stoned after work one evening and said, "hey bru let’s do a golf dev at Sutherland it’ll be fun." And so, a Proposed Golf Estate Development, a blazing thing sprawled out for kilometres, with state of the art irrigation plumbed straight into the water table and a dedicated power-plant (how else would they DO this? Call in David Copperfield? Factoid: Golf courses can use around two million litres of water a day. The Karoo is desert, and water-challenged as it is) festooning the night with bright garlands of light. Dubai-innie-Karoo, with all that goes together with that. No doubt they will go on about “upliftment of the community”, “job-creation”, etc etc but those are such empty, easy words to pull out of a hat when the schpiel comes to town. Please. This is all about Gary Player’s god-complex and the money to be made around it.
Observatory is a Johannesburg suburb, so called because that’s where the observatory was, way back when. Technically, the observatory is still there, although there isn’t any telescope anymore. How can there be? On an average night in Jo’burg you’re hard pressed to find the moon behind the light and smog, nevermind attempt a glimpse of the cosmos beyond. Now it’s a dome-shaped party venue. EXACTLY! That’s the point! It’s in Jo’burg. But we’re talking about Sutherland here, and we're talking about SALT, and the mere fact that the proposal is even under consideration by council is very, very scary. (Maybe they don't understand - maybe they think astronomers are the people who write the daily horoscopes in the paper and maybe they quite rightly suppose that you don't need a telescope to do that.)
Am I just being miserable here? Killjoy? Is SALT that important? Should we lay down in front of the bulldozers? Is that over-reacting? Should we hire an assassin? Would that be more effective?
There's hardly any noise being made about this. Two articles in the Cape Times and that's that. The astronomers at SALT didn't even KNOW about it. I think they weren't supposed to - "Project scientist at Salt, David Buckley... spotted the golf course proposal almost by accident on the Platinum Planet website..."
I don’t think this should just be allowed to go by without some sort of uproar.
Phil?
For the fearless
http://www.anzwers.org/free/universe/index.html
I’m not sure that this website hasn’t been planted by HQ for some nefarious purpose of the Intelligent Design (ID) fraternity, but it’s quite, quite awesome. Funny, I always automatically mistrust things with the words “anzwers” and “free” in the same line. Kind of a knee-jerk reaction. Still, even if it has been planted, I’m not sure it could really be that Dangerous. Unless the ID people are actually in cahoots with Marketing, in which case DO NOT CLICK ON THE ABOVE URL* unless you really want somebody mercilessly, stealthily and subliminally selling you a DVD of “What the Bleep Do We Know” (one free poseable Einstein figurine with every 100 units shipped). Actually, hmmm. ID and Marketing. A marriage made in Heaven? This is quite an interesting idea and I’ve just stumbled on it. Eina.
*It’s too early to tell, of course, so go on, just be brave. Really, it’s amazing. The visible universe…
Neil said...
“All my life, I've felt that I was getting away with something because I was just making things up and writing them down, and that one day there would be a knock, and a man with a clipboard would be standing there and say, ‘It says here you've just been making things up all these years. Now it's time to go off and work in a bank.’”
–Neil Gaiman
–Neil Gaiman
Experiment
I quite like this new green-apple-look template, which is oddly called “Rounders” by the Template People. Rounders I remember playing as a kid, it was something like but not quite cricket, mixed with baseball. This is apple-y though. I wonder: is there an html version of scratch-and-sniff ? A mouse-over-and-waft thingy, or something? It would be lovely to be able to have the scent of apples drift by as the page loads. I’ll have my… ahem… Eye Tea department look into that. (Dio – look into that would you? Eau de Summer Apple ok?)
If I made my own template, it’d look like this:
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
Many innocent people?
There was a full page story in The Star last week about a South African man who got conned by a young, pretty Russian girl over the internet. He parted with a good deal of cash and only realised his mistake when, after having sent her money for a ticket to SA (with two nights stopover in Paris as a special extra) she failed to emerge from the plane at Durban airport. She seemed so sincere, he said. He professes to regret his broken heart more than he regrets the lost cash. He said he was well aware that such scams exist; but that she did not grab any bait that he dangled (?), and was sweet enough (?) to have him “supersede my own set of rules and boundaries.”
Unbelievably, this credulous man is a 60-something attorney from Durban (ie, not a kindly old cabbage farmer driving a donkey cart in a remote village on the Isle of mists in the Land that time forgot... although… Durban… never mind) who had been “playing around on the internet” and visiting dating sites for some time, and who has “other internet girlfriends” too. He says, “I firmly believe that this is hurting many innocent people…” and wants the government to investigate and prosecute such scammers.
Come now, Sir. I might be hard and cruel for saying this, but you can’t have my sympathy.
Two Questions:
- Does anyone know what happened to Rolbos?
- Can anyone explain Carbon Trading to me in words I can understand?
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Must be literate
Do your thing A.R.
Sit down to catch it
flex fingers, light cigarette,
open document
Phone rings
No, thank you
I do not want your steam
cleaning or gym
membership
Paragraph waits, cursor
blinks. Page thinks
get some coffee
phone rings.
Hello caller yes
I know. I’ll see what I
can do of course.
Yes, OK.
Hatchling paragraph flails,
threatens suicide, last chance
catch me now
or else
Gate commotion
arrivals, departures, small
talk, strange weather
we’re having
Phone rings, sorry
she’s not in or wrong number
all day this way.
Sluice paragraph
People are just
doing their thing I’m sure
but because of it,
I can’t
Stephen King says that unless you’re brave enough to shut the door, you won’t. Along with a shut (and bolted, and lead-lined, and bulletproof, and sealed, and bricked up) door, I’m thinking that it might be an idea to build an underground bunker in the middle of a haunted forest. The kind with booby-traps and stuff, and a string sort of thing attached to a catty for pelting hollow-point haycorns at that deranged, lost, unwitting type of intruder who manages to make it through the asp moat by sheer luck. But then, you might spend so much time on defence and paranoia that you wouldn’t get any writing done anyway.
Mr King also said that being married is part of what helps him be so prolific. Yes, I can see how that might work for him. A wife is a useful thing. A good one will feed you, proofread, rescue manuscripts from the bin/laundry/dog, bring tea, keep the children quiet and away from that closed door, screen phone calls (“Dear, this is one you’ll want to take. It’s the publisher, he wants to know how you’d prefer your million buck advance – cheque or cash?”) and generally facilitate your entire career.
ADVERTISEMENT
Aspiring writer seeks good stay at home wife. Must be literate. Must be strict with children and dogs. Contact Audrey ASAP
Sit down to catch it
flex fingers, light cigarette,
open document
Phone rings
No, thank you
I do not want your steam
cleaning or gym
membership
Paragraph waits, cursor
blinks. Page thinks
get some coffee
phone rings.
Hello caller yes
I know. I’ll see what I
can do of course.
Yes, OK.
Hatchling paragraph flails,
threatens suicide, last chance
catch me now
or else
Gate commotion
arrivals, departures, small
talk, strange weather
we’re having
Phone rings, sorry
she’s not in or wrong number
all day this way.
Sluice paragraph
People are just
doing their thing I’m sure
but because of it,
I can’t
Stephen King says that unless you’re brave enough to shut the door, you won’t. Along with a shut (and bolted, and lead-lined, and bulletproof, and sealed, and bricked up) door, I’m thinking that it might be an idea to build an underground bunker in the middle of a haunted forest. The kind with booby-traps and stuff, and a string sort of thing attached to a catty for pelting hollow-point haycorns at that deranged, lost, unwitting type of intruder who manages to make it through the asp moat by sheer luck. But then, you might spend so much time on defence and paranoia that you wouldn’t get any writing done anyway.
Mr King also said that being married is part of what helps him be so prolific. Yes, I can see how that might work for him. A wife is a useful thing. A good one will feed you, proofread, rescue manuscripts from the bin/laundry/dog, bring tea, keep the children quiet and away from that closed door, screen phone calls (“Dear, this is one you’ll want to take. It’s the publisher, he wants to know how you’d prefer your million buck advance – cheque or cash?”) and generally facilitate your entire career.
ADVERTISEMENT
Aspiring writer seeks good stay at home wife. Must be literate. Must be strict with children and dogs. Contact Audrey ASAP
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
